So Many Hosting Choices - so Little Time
The Internet has been around for quite a while but very few of us have been online for more than just a few years. I got my first start about 13 years ago on the Internet, a literal eternity as far as Internet age is concerned. It was at that time that I decided to start a business online and although things were different then, they were also similar in many ways.
At that particular time, there was only one place that you were able to buy a domain name and that was through networksolutions.com. A domain cost about $35, but now they are available in multiple places and many times you can get them for well under $10 each. I purchased the domain name without really knowing what to do with it and I needed to take a crash course on Web hosting. It was amazing how an enhanced my life.
One of the first things that I did was to look at many of the shared hosting companies that were available at that time. In those days, a shared host cost anywhere from $20 per month and up. It is possible for you to get a shared host at well under five dollars a month nowadays, but again, those options were not available to me at the time. By having a shared host, you will have a small piece of a private server that you will share with anywhere from several hundred to a thousand or more other websites. That is how they are able to keep the cost low for these services.
My business eventually grew and the traffic that I was receiving to my website grew along with it. I needed a more robust server in order to handle the traffic that was coming my way and for this, I decided on a VPS. This stands for virtual Private server, and it is simply a way of saying that you are still sharing a server but that you will have a much larger chunk of the resources that are available. Most of these types of servers are only split among six or eight people.
I also started adding additional domains to my portfolio as my business started to grow. There were times whenever I purchased shared server space in order to start a new domain name and then moved it over to a more robust platform as the website started to receive more traffic. I also started to compile old websites on the same server, but I always made sure that each domain name had its own IP address for search engine optimization purposes.
Eventually, my business grew to the point where I could get a dedicated server and host many of my busier websites on it. Having a dedicated server opened me up to even more traffic as I was able to use all of the server resources for my business.
Is it going to take you a little bit of time to understand Web hosting? Of course it is, but the time that you spend understanding hosting and choosing a proper web host is going to enhance your business in a number of different ways. Don’t rush through this decision, as it is going to be a decision that you need to live with for the long term.
